(Reuters) — The U.S. pay-TV industry proposed a plan to allow more than 50 million subscribers to ditch costly set-top boxes to get television and video programs to try and convince federal regulators to abandon more far-reaching reforms.

Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, proposed in January opening the $20 billion cable and satellite TV set-top box market to new competitors and allow consumers to access multiple content providers from a single app or device.

Under the industry proposal unveiled in meetings with the FCC this week, the pay-TV industry would commit to creating apps to allow consumers to watch programs without needing to lease a box and the FCC could implement regulations enforcing the commitment.

Kim Hart, a spokeswoman for Wheeler, said on Friday that he was pleased the “industry has adopted the primary goal of our proposal, to promote greater competition and choice for consumers, and agree it is achievable.”

Wheeler wants to see additional details to “determine whether their proposal fully meets all of the goals of our proceeding,” Hart said.

Wheeler’s proposal has faced criticism from companies like AT&T, Comcast, Twenty-First Century Fox, CBS, Walt Disney, Viacom and others, along with more than 150 members of Congress. They have raised copyright, content licensing and other issues.

Opponents fear rivals like Alphabet or Apple could create devices or apps and insert their own content or advertising in cable content.

Wheeler’s proposal would create a framework for device manufacturers and software developers to allow consumers to access content from providers such as Netflix, Amazon.com, Hulu, YouTube and a pay-TV company on a single device or app.

FCC Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel, a Democrat, praised Wheeler for proposing reforms, but told Reuters “it has become clear the original proposal has real flaws. … We need to find another way forward. So I’m glad that efforts are underway to hash out alternatives.”

The FCC voted 3-2 along party lines in February to advance its plan. A final vote could come as early as August.

Americans spend $20 billion a year to lease pay-TV boxes, or an average of $231 annually, the FCC says. Set-top box rental fees have jumped 185 percent since 1994, while the cost of TVs, computers and mobile phones have dropped by 90 percent.

In April, President Barack Obama backed Wheeler’s proposal, saying the cable industry is “ripe for change.”

(Reporting by David Shepardson; Editing by Leslie Adler)

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2016/06/17/u-s-cable-industry-proposes-allowing-consumers-to-scrap-set-top-boxes-for-apps/feed/01982032U.S. cable industry proposes allowing consumers to scrap set-top boxesHarmonix shifts music gaming again with Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved (hands-on preview)http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/harmonixs-shifts-music-gaming-again-with-disney-fantasia-music-evolved-hands-on-preview/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/harmonixs-shifts-music-gaming-again-with-disney-fantasia-music-evolved-hands-on-preview/#respondTue, 04 Jun 2013 13:00:58 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=746510Disney's classic musical film will come to life in a new form with a motion-controlled exclusive game for Microsoft's consoles.
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Harmonix Music Systems and Disney Interactive attempt to revive the music game business with Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved. They’re billing it as a breakthrough musical motion game.

It will be an exclusive for Kinect on both the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Xbox One game consoles. It has been in development in stealth for more than three years, and it will be published in 2014.

Harmonix has always led the change in music gaming. Founded in 1995 by Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy, Harmonix wandered in the wilderness for a long time. It helped pioneer the faux guitar craze with Red Octane in 2005 with Guitar Hero. Activision, the publisher of Guitar Hero, acquired Red Octane, but Harmonix escaped its grasp. So Harmonix then teamed up with Electronic Arts to make a game with multiple band instruments. Rock Band debuted in 2007 as the primary competition to Guitar Hero. It co-created The Beatles: Rock Band with MTV Games.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Harmonix went through an acquisition by Viacom, owner of MTV, and then a divestiture that turned into a legal mess. Music games, meanwhile, grew to a billion-dollar business and then collapsed as fans got tired of the lack of innovation with faux guitars. Then Harmonix reinvented the genre again in a big way with Dance Central for Microsoft’s Kinect in 2010. The whole market shifted from guitar games to dance games, and Activision shuttered its guitar business altogether.

Disney Fantasia game signals another big moment for music games, said Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix, in an exclusive interview with GamesBeat.

Fantasia is a beloved 75-year-old film with eight memorable vignettes put to classical music. The most iconic of those is a dream sequence with Mickey Mouse as The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, conducting music across the heavens and the seas. If you are expecting to see Mickey Mouse in this game, conducting classical music against the backdrop of the Fantasia film, you couldn’t be further away from what Harmonix is trying to do with this game. At least that’s our impression from what we have seen so far.

“We went further than the film itself into the archives and got access to Walt Disney’s production notes,” Rigopulos said. “We never wanted to make a game of the movie. Instead, we looked at Walt’s creative ambitions. We’re updating those for a modern rendition.”

In the core gameplay, you’ll be able to match your full-body motions to the sound of music and morph that music on the fly to your own liking. You can do so to the tunes of 25 tracks, including Bruno Mars, Fun., Kimbra, Avicii, and Queen.

I played the game in a preview session in advance of the unveiling at the upcoming E3 video game trade show starting June 9 in Los Angeles. It’s all about being immersive and interactive with the worlds of music and magic. You control the game through gestures recognized by the Kinect motion-sensing system. At first, as a song starts, you simply match your movements to the bright animations on the screen, moving your hand to the right just as a couple of animated flares cross each other on the screen. But you can also change the mix in the middle of the song, putting more emphasis on a guitar with an extended guitar solo, or shifting the mix toward drums. You effectively wind up with a remixed version of the song, and that makes you feel like you are in control of the song.

I could navigate in three dimensions using my arms, pressing forward into the scene, or moving from side to side. You can make music by tapping objects in the sea or by moving into an object and creating a song. As you play the song, you have to match your movements to the animations that shoot across the sky like fireworks. You could play in an environment dubbed The Press, an abandoned factory that you have to restore. Or you could head underwater.

In the reef, you can tap on different sea horses and bring the music to a crescendo. Or you can immerse yourself in one particular song. During the song, you can grab visual objects and manipulate them. The result is that the music changes too. While looking at a pretty underwater coral reef (known as The Shoal) and listening to the lovely voice of Queen’s Freddie Mercury during “Bohemian Rhapsody,” I couldn’t help thinking that this had nothing to do with the Fantasia that I remembered from my childhood.

But Rigopulos says that it will follow a narrative that will be familiar to the fans of Fantasia. You enter the “magical realms of Fantasia, selected by the legendary sorcerer Yen Sid to hone their musical and magical prowess as his new apprentice,” according to Disney’s description of the game. Yen Sid creates magical worlds, and your job as the apprentice is to explore them and make a musical experience in them.

“You have to prove that you have what it takes to be The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” said John Drake, the communications and brand management officer at Harmonix.

Chris Nicholls, an executive producer at Disney, noted at a press event that Fantasia never reached its full potential of storytelling through music. The aim was to make music more accessible by giving people a visual language for experiencing it. He said that Walt Disney wanted to release new versions of it in regular installments, but that never happened. When it was released in 1940, it required theaters to be set up with 100 loudspeakers, all synchronized to the picture. But it only got to 12 theaters before World War II derailed it.

“We dug into it and its innovations in cinematography behind the scenes,” Nicholls said. “Walt had always imagined Fantasia as an evolving platform of music and content and animation. It would live through the years with new music and new content released in the theaters. That never happened.”

The team took that idea as their inspiration, taking the power of music and putting it in the player’s hands, and using it to build an experience around you.

“You could step into Mickey’s shoes and be The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” Nicholls said.

Disney Fantasia has been in the works for years. Rigopulos said his teams were experimenting with what they could do after Dance Central. They wanted to do more with motion controls, and weren’t really excited when Disney came calling. But then Disney revealed that it wanted Harmonix to work on a Fantasia game, and the vision came together, Rigopulos said.

The hope is to create an accessible title with as broad an audience as possible, Rigopulos said. You can still compete to hit all of the chords at the right moment. But the creative part of the game isn’t competitive.

The new Kinect for the Xbox One is going to be a lot more accurate with many more features. but Rigopulos said the experience on the Xbox 360’s Kinect will still be very precise.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/harmonixs-shifts-music-gaming-again-with-disney-fantasia-music-evolved-hands-on-preview/feed/0746510Harmonix shifts music gaming again with Disney Fantasia: Music Evolved (hands-on preview)Apple’s Tim Cook to face judge about Apple, Google, Intel anti-poaching pacthttp://venturebeat.com/2013/01/18/apples-tim-cook-to-be-questioned-by-judge-about-apple-google-intel-anti-poaching-practices/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/18/apples-tim-cook-to-be-questioned-by-judge-about-apple-google-intel-anti-poaching-practices/#respondFri, 18 Jan 2013 15:40:06 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=606826Apple is one of a list of companies accused of agreeing not to recruit each other's employees.
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Apple’s Tim Cook will shortly be hearing a question something like that, as Justice Lucy Koh has ordered him to appear in court to give a deposition regarding alleged antitrust violations. Apple is one of a list of companies, including Intuit, Adobe, Google, and Pixar, that are being accused of agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees.

According to the DOJ, the anti-poaching agreements reached back as far as 2005 for Apple and Adobe, 2006 for Apple and Google, and 2007 for Apple and Pixar. The settlement at the time prohibited the companies from “entering, maintaining or enforcing any agreement that in any way prevents any person from soliciting, cold calling, recruiting, or otherwise competing for employees.”

The current lawsuit is a follow-on action brought by employees who claim that the companies’ illegal agreements harmed their employment prospects. And while Cook was not Apple’s CEO at the time, Bloomberg reports that Justice Koh told Apple lawyers that since Steve Jobs was copied on emails about the practice, she found it hard to believe that Cook would not have been consulted as well.

There’s currently no timetable for Cook’s deposition, but Google’s Eric Schmidt will be deposed on February 20, and Intel’s Paul Otellini will be grilled in the next few weeks.

If Apple and the other tech companies lose the lawsuit, which is being brought employees as varied as engineers and chefs, they would be liable for additional salary and compensation for the affected staff.

Justice Koh is the same judge who is presiding over many of the Apple-Samsung legal battles. You’d think she’d be getting a little tired of seeing the Cupertino company in her courtroom.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/01/18/apples-tim-cook-to-be-questioned-by-judge-about-apple-google-intel-anti-poaching-practices/feed/0606826Apple’s Tim Cook to face judge about Apple, Google, Intel anti-poaching pactWalt Disney Parks and Resorts check-in to Gowallahttp://venturebeat.com/2010/11/18/disney-gowalla/
http://venturebeat.com/2010/11/18/disney-gowalla/#respondThu, 18 Nov 2010 14:52:29 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=227832Popular mobile check in application Gowalla today announced a new partnership with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. The agreement will provide Gowalla users with custom Disney Gowalla pages, a collection of recent check ins and activities for specific parks and resorts, as well as hundreds of available custom Passport stamps, an image in recognition for […]
]]>Popular mobile check in application Gowalla today announced a new partnership with Walt Disney Parks and Resorts.

The agreement will provide Gowalla users with custom Disney Gowalla pages, a collection of recent check ins and activities for specific parks and resorts, as well as hundreds of available custom Passport stamps, an image in recognition for checking in to a specific attraction.

Disney and Gowalla have come up with several ways to promote the new partnership, according to the Disney Parks Blog. Special events will be held throughout the year as well as the launch of a series of trips, a special bundle of attractions by age and interest. The company gives the following example:

Disney is definitely a high-profile brand that makes sense for Gowalla as it looks to compete for users with rival Foursquare. Both Gowalla and Foursquare recently partnered with government agency NASA, which brought a ton of attention to the companies. Interestingly, Gowalla made the NASA partnership announcement first, but Foursquare quickly followed.

On a more personal note, I was recently in Disney World and used Foursquare to check in all over the place. You can’t imagine all the stuff you can do on your smartphone while waiting in line for an attraction. But I’d have to say that after a few check ins, I became bored. If the Gowalla and Disney had this partnership while I was there, I’d probably be a Gowalla user at this time. Another interesting angle to these partnerships – which ones can make users switch sides?